So over the last year or two, I had suspected the teardrop HPS fixtures along the historic area downtown, were getting replaced with LED flyswatters.

Well I was right, recently a double install of them was removed and replaced with ONE AEL Micro LED!

Really Duke Energy, you just take these decorative fixtures down and replace with the smallest, cheapest LED crap?!

I’m not sure how they’re getting away with this as I’m pretty sure the city or historical society paid extra to have those lights installed some 15 years ago.

I’ve thought about letting them know that Duke is cheating here and not installing the correct fixtures, but I assume they already know and don’t want to pay extra.

What was odd is one of the fixtures WAS replaced with what appeared to be an LED version a few years back, but it too was removed.

What the heck?!

They even could’ve just converted them to LED like they have done to the post top acorn fixtures, they just install a corn cob LED bulb in them.

Ugh, I hate value engineered retrofits such as this. Completely ruins the original look. I was glad Toronto opted to use these to replace the MH gumballs instead of some generic LED thing.

If the old teardrops were in good condition they should have opted to retrofit them to LED instead. I believe a lot of those teardrops have a OEM LED retrofit kit that lets you use the old housings and performs about as well as a new LED teardrop. Might have even been cheaper than those generic looking LEDs and looked a lot better.

Duke is doing this ridiculous "value engineering" in my area too lately, like spot-replacing 250-400W medium cobras on 4' arms with ATB Micros on 2' arms. I get that material costs are up, but it just looks awful and will likely stay that way for a long time.

That said, their distribution line construction has looked like dog s--t for decades, so there's not much lower to go, but they sure are trying.

So far the 400w HPS teardrop luminaires in my area aren't being replaced or converted. They are still flourishing in the wild along with the 400w, Semi-cutoff Holophane mongooses. But all the other streetlights like AEL 125 and older are all replaced by LED and there is probably only 2 that I know of in the wild and they don't even work! It is already hard to find even a GE m400 3rd gen here and most of the city is LED except for the very old parking lots that still used AEL 327 mercury vapor.